Boxing has a rich history in Santa Maria.
From the teams at Santa Maria High School in the late 1940s and 1950s, to the popularity of the sport among service members at Camp Cook (today known as Vandenberg Air Force Base), to local amateur standouts like Blas Torrez in the 1950s, to professional boxers who worked their way up to world title fights and the Olympic games, the sport has sustained an important presence in the Santa Maria Valley for decades.
Eddie Navarro and Al Ramos of the Santa Maria Valley Sports History Club recognized the depth of this history and worked together to compile photos, newspaper clippings, fight gear, and other boxing relics to display at the Santa Maria Library for all to see.
While Olympian and budding professional fighter Karlos Balderas is the talk of boxing in Santa Maria today, it’s the decades prior that are most eye-catching about the exhibit. The 1940s and 1950s were a particularly popular era among young men for boxing, from high schoolers to military members.
“In the ’50s and the ’60s, amateur boxers were really like semi-pros,” Willie Flores, a former boxer and longtime boxing trainer and manager, said while sitting around a table at the Santa Maria Library. “I say that because they didn’t wear head gear, and the gloves were smaller than they are today.”
One of those semi-pro amateurs was Blas Torrez, a Nebraska native who said he started boxing at age 13 before enlisting in the Army, where he also boxed in Korea, Japan, and at the home base, Camp Cook.
“My commanding officer got a phone call from the gym at Camp Cook. They were starting up a boxing team,” Torrez said with infectious jubilance. “I got my first break in the service. ‘Would you like to get in there?’ he asked. I said, ‘Whatever you say!’”
Torrez also fought all over Southern California, taking trips to Bakersfield and Los Angeles for matches and getting written up in the local press. Often, Torrez would go head to head with another local boxer. There was no bad blood though, at least on his end.
“I just loved the sport so much,” he said.
Clyde Stokes also fell in love with boxing while serving the country. A Korean War veteran and Purple Heart recipient, Stokes was fearless in combat as well as in the ring. In the early 1950s, he would make trips to the federal prison in Lompoc to fight the inmates.
Asked if anything about that intimidated him, the elderly Stokes chuckled: “I was 21 years old. I thought I could fight anybody.”
As boxing grew in popularity in Santa Maria, the infrastructure to support its growth expanded. Flores found his passion in training up-and-coming boxers, and with the Santa Maria Boxing Club helped boxers like Maggie Suarez and Tony Ojeda compete for world titles.
“It was a very, very exciting and rewarding, coming from a little town like Santa Maria,” Flores said.
The library boxing exhibit went down on Jan. 2, but keep an eye out for the Sports History Club’s next display project in March.
Contributor Peter Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@newtimesslo.com.
This article appears in Jan 4-11, 2018.